Janey feels something cold on her back and realizes Mary is doing the same. The salty clay by the sea smells different than the red veins that run through the dirt. This clay smells like seawater and freshly slaughtered fish. She reaches down and smooths muck over her skin, squishing it between her fingers. Helping Mary repatch the coating over her smooth back and legs, she then pats it carefully around Mary’s green eyes so it won’t fall in. By the end of summer, everyone’s eyes are scarlet with irritation.
Later the other children, victors and losers alike, drift off. Janey moves closer to the brush lining the shore and begins building a fort. She breaks twigs and long, flexible branches off the bushes and erects them in the sand for the frame. Then she and Mary weave branches into walls, going over and under in a soothing rhythm until she’s not thinking about anything at all. It gets dark and Mary yawns, totters, and falls asleep, but Janey keeps working. She is too happy, too energetic to sleep, and time slips past as the stars burn their way across the sky and the sun rises again. When Mary wakes at dawn, the fort is almost done, and the walls have been packed with clay, thick and smooth.
Janey grins when she sees Mary awake, the mud on her face cracking like a large, hideous egg to reveal soft freckled skin beneath.
“Did you forget to sleep?” asks Mary.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Janey says.
It is. Janey’s always been good at doing things with her hands. The small patches of wall Mary built are rough and uneven, wood poking through the mottled clay. Janey’s are perfect, tight and uniform.
Mary rolls onto her belly and yawns. “Now what?”
“Now we live here forever.”
“But I want breakfast.”
Janey rolls her eyes. “Sea roaches are probably edible.”
“Ugh.”
“Oh, come on,” says Janey. “We can stay in here forever. We’ll never come out.” She can’t think of a more perfect future. Her, Mary, the beach, a house they built themselves.
“That would be boring.”
“It would be perfect.” Janey lies back on the sand, staring at the porous roof over their heads, the milky, seeping chinks of sunlight. “We’ll tell each other stories all day, and watch the stars at night. We’ll live on fish and water.” She yawns. “We’ll never get any older.”
Chapter Fifteen
Amanda
Amanda hates summers now. She knows why the adults let the children run free: they’re too tired to do anything else. When the temperature spikes, the sun bullies the plants until they wilt and are only refreshed by the warm afternoon rains. Amanda is sheltered from the sun, but she wilts too. She can’t open the window or the doors unless she wants to invite a ravenous cloud of mosquitoes into the house. Netting is too precious to waste on houses; it’s saved for men working outside, and animal pens, and walls or roofs that fall in during the summer. In her house, there are tiny cracks in the walls and the windowsills that let in a small, steady stream of golden bloodsuckers. She is forever slapping her arms and legs, leaving bloody smears and ruddy handprints, setting out to hunt down the source of the whining, hungry hum and giving up before she goes two steps. The backs of her knees and creases under her breasts drip with sweat. She doesn’t mind giving food away to the muddy children outside; in this heat, eating itself seems repulsive. When Andrew reminds her that the baby needs to eat, she chokes down bites of cold porridge. She naps in the summer heat, rolling over slowly in a pool of sweat like a piece of meat being basted.
Sometimes when the downpours start, Amanda loses her self-control and races outside to stand in the rain, letting the warm torrents wash over her. The mosquitoes set forth hopefully, but raindrops smack most of them off her flesh before they can draw blood. The children shy away from her, unused to seeing a summer adult stand still in the rain. She’d love to tear off her dress, slap mud all over herself, and sprint toward the nearest tree. But the mud would drip in globs off her breasts and belly, cake in the hair between her legs, spatter when her flesh jiggled as she ran. She would disgust everyone.
Andrew comes home to find her with her arms out and head back, inviting the rain to further soak her clothes and skin. He manhandles her inside. “You can’t do that, Amanda,” he says, his brow creasing. “Everyone can see you.”
It’s true, and she has no doubt that news will spread across the island in a matter of days. Amanda Balthazar, gone crazy. Women have very little amusement during the summer besides gossip.
“But it’s so hot,” she whines, hating herself.
“This is not the way to fight it,” he answers, putting a gentle arm around her soaked belly. He doesn’t offer suggestions for the right way, she notes irritably. “I’m sure you’re so uncomfortable and acting so…oddly because you’re pregnant. It will be better next summer.” She doesn’t say anything, allowing him to blame her behavior on pregnancy.
Andrew brings Amanda into the kitchen and offers her a dry dress from her cupboard, but she shakes her head. She sits at the table, dripping onto the stained floor, while he slices a dried apple for her and pours her lukewarm water. Amanda doesn’t feel hungry or thirsty, but she nibbles at some apple to please him. His face relaxes. “Imagine telling this story to our children,” he says, laughing. “The day Mother went crazy and stood out in the rain.”
The apple is sickly-sweet and leathery on her tongue, hard to swallow. “What would you say if I said I wanted to leave?” she says suddenly, too loudly.
“Leave the house? Now? You’ll get eaten alive.”
“No, leave for the wastelands.”
He laughs, then frowns when Amanda doesn’t change expression. “You’re serious?”
“Yes. What if I wanted to leave the island?”
“Well, you can’t. I mean. How could you?”
“I don’t know. But pretend I had a way to leave.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, just pretend. Would you leave with me?” She leans forward and clasps his hands in hers.
“Leave the island?”
“Yes.”
“Amanda,” he says, putting his hands on her damp shoulders, “why would I want to do that?”
“Just to see what it’s like out there.”
“Why would I want to see that?”
“To see for ourselves. To live by ourselves. There must be food there, otherwise what do the people who give things to the wanderers eat? They bring in rice, don’t they, we don’t grow rice. Who grows the rice? The netting. Someone makes paper, and it’s much better than ours.”
“They take what the dead left behind,” says Andrew, shrugging.
“But not everyone is dead. I mean, I’ve heard there are defectives and freaks that walk the wastelands. And families come in from the wastelands, sometimes, which means at least a few people aren’t defective or freaks, right? At least a few. Caitlin Jacob isn’t a defective.”
“Okay, fine. But why would you want to raise our baby there?”
She pauses. “I just, I need to go.”
Andrew is staring into her eyes confused, as if trying to catch a glimpse of sense in them. He takes her forearms lightly. “Amanda, we can’t go. I don’t want to go. We have a house here, and food, and family, and a whole community. This life is a gift from the ancestors—why would you want to throw it all away?” He frowns at her.
“You’re just quoting from church. I feel like…things might be different there.”
“Of course they would.”
“I think maybe this isn’t right.”